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Where Have All the Pagers Gone?
oddRaisin writes "After recently sleeping through a page for work, I decided to change my paging device from my BlackBerry (which is quiet and has a pathetic vibrate mode) to an actual pager. After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, I'm left scratching my head and wondering where all the pagers went. I can't find them or any mention of them. Pagers of yore offered some great features that reflected the serious nature of being paged. They were loud. They had good vibrate modes. They continued to alert after a page until you acknowledged them. I didn't have to differentiate between a text from a friend and a page from work. Now that pagers seem to have become passé, what are other people doing to fill this niche? Are some phones better pagers than others? Are there still paging service providers out there?"
Look out - they're right behind you!
I can't stand cell phones, I only got one out of extreme necessity (and because my work stopped using pagers). I like to concentrate - I hate how cell phones immediately "demand" to be picked up. If you don't pick up you've got to listen to some damn message - and you're sitting wondering about the content of the message until you listen to it.
With a pager, someone notified me of their desire to speak to me, I wrap up whatever I'm doing, and I call them. If it's really urgent, they put a 911 at the end and I move a little quicker. I really do miss them... I can't be the only one... right... right?!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Why, the same place all the slide rules went, of course.
--Q
lmfao.
my hokey pokey town had pagers in the early 2000s.. kinda hilarious.
i dunno wtf you need a pager for if you have a cell phone. Get a nice cell that does all the bells and whistles YOU desire and you're gtg.
Check with your local Hospital geek. Doctors, nurses, social workers, pretty much everyone in a hospital still has one. They are starting to introduce a "cellular phone" into hospitals known by the local docs as a "banana phone" due to its yellow color that indicates its a special super-duper-won't-interfere-with-life-support-machines-phone as opposed to the iKill. But only the most important doctors have them right now, due to the advanced complexity of their magic.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
He wants his manifesto back.
Read Pynchon.
Why don't you get another cellphone? Look at online reviews to find one with a more intense vibration, and if you want, you can set the notification tone to be something longer than a beep.
/., I can alternatively be super obnoxious and say get the OpenMoko phone and then you can program it to behave however you want on the reception of a text message.
Of course since is
It looks like the 'features' you are missing can be solved by software. Now that Google has opened the door for truly customizable phones you could write an app that would ring really loudly until you acknowledge the page/sms/email based on filtering rules.
If you really want an actual pager, just try a popular search engine, you'll find plenty of stores that sell them.
Pagers are found with all interns, residents and attending surgeons in Seattle Grace Hospital.
Myself and some co-workers spent quite a while recently researching this; except for a few people in our group, we agreed that the best substitute for a pager was to have a large-breasted secretary in a nurse-like outfit mind our phones and repeatedly slap our face with their titties if we got a page - sort of like motorboating, but with them doing all the work.
Pagers appear to have been one of those things that America went for with great gusto but Europe and Asia moved passed pretty quickly as cell phones became cheaper and more accessable. Outside of the movies I haven't seen an actual, real, pager. Ever. Pagers are basically SMS capable mobile phones but crappier. It's push-only for crying out loud! You may as well have a steam engine strapped to your back.
tl;dr: I can't believe this is even an Ask Slashdot. Seriously, this is such a "Dur" question I'm ashamed to be associated with it in case I catch the stupid.
I just saw a janitor with a pager on at work the other day and my brain went "woah a pager!". I've seen a few other people wearing them but it's pretty rare. I wonder if there's some business trade show where they're being advertised.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Thats funny.. I still have one. And it talks!
Youmail has made voicemail and my cell phone a lot more livable. It takes over for the voicemail functions of your provider and records the incoming message. It optionally sends you a text message with the details of the call (phone number, duration, message left or not) and optionally texts or emails you a transcription of the message. The free version uses what is at times a comical transcription, but it is still normally enough to figure out what your caller was trying to tell you (and sometimes it is spot-on), and the texts and emails are free too. The $7 a month version uses a more accurate transcription method.
It also emails you an MP3 of the message. Of course, you can also call them up and listen to your messages, or go to the website and listen to them online rather like visual voicemail. It makes voicemail almost as good as a pager in a lot of ways. ;-)
Mabybe you need to assign a different ring-tone to your work numbers ?
They once, perhaps, were the rage.
But now it's time to turn the page.
-capt poetry
Custom Ringtones are you friend here.
When I use to be on call I setup a ringtone for calls from the overnight answering service. Reveille was usually my choice as bugles blaring full blast usually woke me up from even my worst alcohol induced slumbers. With the Blackberry I know you can set these rules to override your sound profile. So you could set your profile to silent and avoid all other calls\txts but the custom rules would still come through.
Man I miss my BlackBerry....stupid WinMo pos smartphone, Oh well I'm not on call anymore :D so it isn't as bad.
metrotelpaging.com
Along with a few dozen other companies dedicated to this service. It's one thing if finding the answer takes some serious searching, but this is just silly.
I have an old defunct pager that still lights up when pressed. I keep it on my belt when I want people to think how important I am. Sometimes I'll bump the button so it lights up and I can then say: "They really need me, sorry but I have to go."
Pagers definitely have not gone, they just have become unpopular among consumers as two-way messaging replaced it. Hospitals and the US Government use one-way pagers still a lot. Our company was apparently taken over by another larger one, http://www.usamobility.com/
My nokia 6310i has a "pager" mode, when you receive an SMS, it keeps beeping as loud as it can until you do something.
Very annoying, but can also be very useful.
Frank
A cell phone is basically a consumer device. A pager was fundamentally a business device. The differences were legion. What I miss most is having a service where the clients were given the number of a human-staffed service and those operators then keyed in the message. Clients were also told that vague messages would get slower responses than specific ones. If they wanted my attention at 9:00 p.m. on a busy night then a "call us" message would leave then sh*t out of luck. They wanted attention, they had to manage to describe coherently and specifically why they needed my attention to an operator who knew neither of us and knew less about computers than the average modern grandma.
"I need him" ."
"Is that what I should write, sir?"
"Um, uh, um, no. Say, um, that, um, it's important."
"So I should say 'call, it's important?'"
"Um, no, um . .
It took only a few iterations to train clients to articulate the issue *before* hitting my number on speeddial.
"The archive server is down."
"Stories sent to blues are getting bounced."
Anybody who has done consulting will understand that this completely changed the dynamic. Among other things, this requirement to specify the problem got rid of a huge percent of the normal degree of blame game b.s. afterwards. It also taught clients that they had to reign in their panic if they wanted me to call. And sometimes by forcing them to define the problem, that act alone got them to fix the frackin' problem themselves and not waste my time at all. When I *did* get a page I could take a few minutes and think through the message and gather my thoughts about my response before having to be on the phone with them.
I'm not a consultant anymore but, gawd, if I were, I just don't know how I would do it without that glorious gatekeeper, the pager.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
They definatly still exist - they provide a much more robust service than SMS (delivery conformation>? SLA's, you say? Ha!).
Orange/3 provide them at least in australia, at least, and a quick google revelead a pile of pager providers in the US - ymmv. but they're definatly out there (and they do definantly provide advantages over SMS if your service is important. Yours may or may not be...)
Commodore 64, Loading up the dance floor!
Where the fuck do we get these questions from? "What is my name?" "Where am I?" "How do I open a jar of pickles?" "How do I use a penis?" Fuck's sake.
After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, I'm left scratching my head and wondering where all the pagers went.
Of course they don't offer pagers—they're much too busy selling cell phone service at 10 times the cost of pager service to 1000 times the people.
Try Googling for "pager".
There are still pager providers. I have a pager from Skytel for work. http://www.skytel.com/wireless_paging_devices.html I've got a Titan 3 pager. It has a heinous alert tone that would be nearly impossible to sleep through.
Really this is an ask slashdot?
type pager into google and a whole bunch of services pop up...
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
I don't know what would happen, but the user manual warns against it. (scroll to the bottom) Pager Manual
In the rubbish heap mate.
You know.. the unix group one, the general IT/boss asking WTF?!/ one and of course the rotating idiot user support one for two weeks at a time. You felt like an ass/ubergeek carrying around 3 pagers (all of different eras/technologies).
Simple!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
You also didn't have to recharge your pager once a night. I remember two AA batteries going for months in my old pager.
-David
InfoRad, which makes a program that you can use to page has a list of pager companies on their website under "resellers"
http://www.inforad.com/reseller.html
Also, talk to your local real estate agents and see what they're using. Many have switched to blackberries, but many aren't since there could be up to a 24 hour delay in receiving messages (I've seen a lot of lost business because of this - could be provider related, and probably is).
My work is too cheap to let me have a crack berry, so I have a 2 way pager, from a company that is alive and kicking, American Messaging, which is old old Verizon Messaging company (Pager still has a Verizon badge on it) www.americanmessaging.net
Google is your friend... They still exist. Doctors still hate them. Just you don't get them from Verizon, ATT, Sprint, etc. But as Google can show you, there are paging services still out there. Beepers.com might be a better place to look as metrotel's website wasn't working for me...
Check out American Messaging for paging: http://www.americanmessaging.net/paging/index.asp
were folded into the creation of Verizon with the other US Vodafone assets, then eventually sold to American Messaging (americanmessaging.net). These folks appear to have bought out other US Bell pager networks like SBC.
Pager coverage is actually pretty damn good. Come to think about it, I had less issues with pager coverage than cell coverage even though it was obvious they broadcast pages cross a given region, a few states or cross the nation wide network. Service was pretty damned reasonable, about $8/month or so IIRC, about the same as unlimited texts on t-mobile.
Why did I ditch it? Well the pager networks got bought out by other people, changed hands, and they no longer offered some of the handy dandy services they once did, which would include web->page and or e-mail->page without adding a ton of formating data. As in, one could attach a pager to a page reader via TTL serial and issue commands remotely. Mucking with the system resulted in too many garbage characters, and I could either revamp the system or go with something internet based.
But pagers still have their use. Coverage is still pretty damn good.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Eh, I just don't see a place for pagers in today's world. I'm able to set a separate ringtone (including a separate SMS-tone) for my work numbers and it works just fine. But then again, I'm the kind of geek that likes to have an all-in-one device, hence why my next phone will be wifi-capable once my contract with Verizon expires.
I mentioned your problem to my wife.
She graciously has offered to send you her pager. Just post your address in response to this post. We will even, as a public service, pay for shipping.
I can attest to the fact the unit is plenty loud. As a bonus, you will get plenty of pages for problems that an engineer should never be called for and should have been handled by customer support.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Where do I get a job where I get paid for sleeping through pages? Some of my code may look as if I was asleep on the job, but that excuse doesn't really work.
Page is a noun referring either to printed material or to a human being paid to take messages, pager is a noun meaning a paging device.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I think that pagers have been obsolete for more than 10 years now.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
Great, now I have this song going through my head: "Where have all the pagers gone? Long time passing. Where have all the pagers gone? Long time ago..."
I'm sometimes tempted to text back "Double dumbass on you" or something else inflammatory -- then sit back and watch the 6 o'clock news. But that would be evil.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
http://www.skytel.com/
Our pager team carries Skytel pagers because they have guaranteed delivery SLAs. We have tried SMS with all of the major providers over the years and they cannot reliably deliver messages in a reasonable amount of time. It's the best option short of having a NOC staffed 24/7/365.
Whining about your BlackBerry vibration level is just lame. Just get another cell-phone if BlackBerry doesn't suit you. I have a SonyEricsson W800i that can ring as loud as I need (and from time to time I work in a very loud environment) and it's small enough to fit into my jeans' pocket. I never had a pager. With a cell-phone you can talk, SMS, MMS, take pictures, listen to MP3s, check mail or news. For a little extra, you can get GPS navigation and TV shows (I'm thinking at the insanely Nokia N96). WTF is wrong with a good cellphone?! It wouldn't be long until I hear people complaining about lack of wired phone, horse-cars (environment-friendly!) or CP/M.
And you know that a pager doesn't have the email capabilities of a BlackBerry, right?
My phone has a silent mode and it doesn't go to an answering service if I don't pick it up, it just gets recorded as a missed call.
If you have a problem with cell phones it's because you let it control you rather than vice-versa.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Unless you completely reject a cellphone, deliberately reducing the functionality of the device you are carrying, why would you want to carry both a cell phone and a pager?
Simply because the cellphone's pager is not good enough? It always puzzled me, why would people carry more than one of pager and cellphone (much like why would anybody mix grep, sed, and awk in one command line, but I digress). My guess was, it had to do with the status, an attempt to derive importance from the number of gizmos carried...
I guess, I'm not the only one wondering, why carry more than of these devices — and that's why pagers are going away — as you found out...
The only plausible reason I can see, is when one of the devices is employer-provided and the employer's policy prohibits (or discourages) personal use. That's a sign of a silly employer, though — in appreciation of the employee being always reachable, they should allow personal use of the device (save for outright abuses).
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
We still use pagers for our notification systems. Most cell providers do not do guaranteed delivery/receipt of text messages while 2 way paging service will. It often has a much larger range than cell towers will give you and works further inside building that cell phones die in. Regardless of what many say here, pagers are not obsolete.
I personally have found the USAMobility people responsive enough, generally knowledgeable and the times the device has broken, they've had a new one to me in 24 hours.
Others have mentioned Skytel and Metrotel, which offer similar services and models. (Quite a few of the paging companies have been bought up or been consolidated, but generally I've found the coverage areas have not reduced).
sms and gsm has replaced pagers in Belgium a long time ago.
You can see who is calling you. You can ignore it and let the anwering machine pick it up and call that a minute later to decide wether or not it is importand enough to take action on.
People can send you an SMS and describe better what they want to say.
You can have people call your fixed line, use selection and then send an SMS so that you get the same information you got previously. This might be good for you. It is lousy customer service.
sms and gsm is superieour in any way.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You could tell people to text you. Just have to find the right phone that has the setting that will keep annoying until you respond to the text or call that you got. Verizon phones I know have that option to page people. You can set your phone to take them directly to voice or text option as soon as it rings once. That allows you to weed out the texts and calls.
And need I remind you of a small invention called eBay? Or even some 7-11's still have Metrocall pagers for sale.
They went the same way as typewriters.
Pagers do not use a cellular network and consequently don't report their position, like cellphones necessarily do when they associate with a BTS. Real pagers never send. That makes them ideal for RF sensitive environments (e.g. hospitals) but it also makes them ideal for people who are fed up with being trackable. (Alternatively, you can use a satellite phone.)
BT discontinued their pager network years ago; there do still seem to be companies about in the UK who provide them though (such as PageOne). I'm sure you can scare some up in the US as well - my guess is its become a niche market the larger players are no longer interested in.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
I run a small comms company in the UK. Every now and again we have a problem that causes everything to grind to a halt. Our on-call engineers were using their mobiles (cells) for support notification, but we kept missing faults. There are so many flaws with the way mobiles notify SMSs:
1 - It can take days for a SMS to be delivered (rare, but certainly happens on occasion). We have *never* had a page delivered more than 2 minutes delay. Most of the time, it's about 10 seconds!
2 - If you're away from your mobile when the SMS arrives, you've no way of knowing that it's there unless you look at the phone. Our pagers are configured to beep/vibrate continuously until they're acknowledged.
3 - Mobiles don't have loud enough beeps or vibrate strongly enough. Pagers do!
4 - Go to a customer in a dodgy signal area and you don't get the SMS/voicemail until you get signal back. We haven't found an area of the country in which our pager (Vodafone) doesn't work. They work inside buildings, they work in the open countryside and they work in built up areas.
What's more, they're not expensive - GBP10 a month gets you a decent unit with a personalised answering service ("Hello, company XXXXX, please can I take your message") as well as an e-mail to pager service and you can even do HTTP POSTs to Vodafone's website to send from there.
We wouldn't be without our pagers. If anybody's interested, we get ours from http://pagers.co.uk/.
Nick.
Nothing at allll to see here, move along...
expandfairuse.org
http://www.mysecretaryusa.com/
Pagers are the best solution for providing after hours support. They have far better reception, and a service which is far more reliable than SMS/text.
Never mind the volume/features, pagers just worked better. They were indestructible (unless you REALLY tried - I washed mine at least twice), worked in elevators, and best of all allowed the support person to decide when to call back. If I'm in a movie and the phone goes off I'd better answer it or my boss is all over me. With a pager as long as I returned a call within say 20 minutes, all was fine. Most times 20 minutes is all you really need. Cell phones have increased expectations reducing the technical person's quality of life. It's all about instant reactions which aren't realistic or fair.
The discontinuation of the pager was done because the telco earns more money from a cell customer than a pager customer. A pager contract runs somewhere between $10-50(CAN) depending on the service/number of pages. I can't even get a basic cell phone service for less than $60. iPhones? You're looking at $80-100 a month depending on your plan. I can't call out on a pager, thus there's no air time to charge, pagers are a dead end business.
Most of the medical community here have set up their own paging systems with limited coverage to provide the service. It's all about the business, and nothing about the technology or the need.
Telus used to offer a hybrid known as a "Mike" which was a phone with a pager built in. They've all but discontinued it as well. The pager and the radio service was cutting into the bottom line.
You can say "80's technology" all you want. There's absolutely NO reason why a pager like service can't be built into cell phones (see Mike phones for an example) to provide the robust message capabilities that IT support needs. If you need another example, the local telcos (Telus and Rogers) have started to charge customers for RECEIVED SMS messages. They weren't making enough money from the IT folks who were sending out notifications I guess. Something about having to send 10 messages to make sure one got through and they figured since they couldn't charge for the mail interface they'd charge the receiving phone.
I really do look forward to the day when cell phone companies are made accountable for their business practices. Actions like blocking health studies, excessive billing for everything from text messages to roaming charges, not doing something about the driving on the phone problem*, and the contract crap that requires a lawyer to get out of (or a $600 bill!). Why is it exactly that I can't buy a phone which I can use anywhere without going to "Mr. Woo's House of Phones" down in China Town? (And paying about three times as much as the phone is worth!)
*(If they can send an AD when I walk by a store, they know where I am and thus can tell me how fast I'm moving. If I'm moving more than say 30km/h, disconnect the call - problem solved. And don't say, "well, what if I'm on a bus?" Tough. Just because there's open liquor in a vehicle doesn't mean the driver's drinking, but it's still the law. Some idiots screwed up, we all get to deal with it.)
Ok, I feel better now. Damn, almost forgot to plug in my phone...
Can anyone recommend a phone with some sort of useful text filtering capabilities? I receive nagios pages via an email->SMS gateway to my iPhone, but its worthless. There is no way to group the pages, each one shows as a separate "conversation" in the SMS interface. There is no way to do any sort of expression matching to select a ringtone (or for any other purpose). Deleting n pages requires 2(n+1) operations on a not especially responsive touch interface (all the shiny animations take forever).
Can third party apps on Android handle SMS? Any other platform? Ideally I would like to use regexes to group texts into "conversations", to determine what tone or vibration should occur, and ideally be able to tidy up the message a bit (the email->sms gateway loads it down with information I already know).
What do pagers offer that SMS can't? If someone calls while I'm in a store, I just "hang up". Then I call back when I get out. If someone wants to send me a message saying "I'll be late.", SMS is your answer. I carry enough gadgets already without having a designated "call me"-device.
Insert `fortune -o` here
i use an iridium pager as i travel a lot. the main features of pagers are (still) that most of them are passive devices (be it flex, pocsag or in my case iridium) -> they don't emit any rf-signal (which is not entirely true - i found the intermediate frequency radiation from my iridium pager rather 'loud') thus are not trackable. also they mostly have no back-channel thus limit the way one can interact with them. By carrying a pager with me i can be reached but it is at my discretion to answer - unlike a phone call or sms i do have an excuse not to call ;-)
just my 0.02eur
I work at a facility where cell phones don't work. We use Skytel pagers. We ditched them in favor of Nextel/Sprint walkies. We're ditching those and going back to Skytel pagers.
I'm guessing it's because there isn't anything a pager can do that a cellphone can't. You might have to shop around a bit to get one that gives you the most pager-like experience. Perhaps there is some difference in the pager vs. SMS networking that may effect things that may be critical if you're a doctor etc., but otherwise pagers just seem redundant.
Silicon Heaven!
Alchemist: Be Thou For the People
The battery on a pager lasts for weeks. On some models, months. Pagers don't transmit, so they can be used in high sensitivity areas. They're very cheap to run.
Pagers are still popular - in places like Hospitals they're still mandatory as mobile phones are banned (still, although that's (slowly) changing).
Speak with your local emergency services. All of us in the volunteer groups carry pagers for the same reasons you describe. Volunteer fire and rescue are your best bets, but also hospitals would be a great help in finding your local dealer.
You could do that just as easily by not giving your work phone cell phone number to friends.
I'm an engineer & run the network central to our company, so must continually be on-call.
If an SMS comes through on modern phones, they'll beep once or twice & that's it. That won't wake me up!
The only phone I've had that had the option to continually ping you until you acknowledge it, was an old Windows Mobile, HTC - and it was constantly crashing.
IMO, this is a horrible oversight by the Blackberry range (which I now use).
I've now setup a procmail filter to set off a siren whenever certain Nagios alerts come through. Annoying, but the best available option.
I've carried one for decades. There are still places, like computer labs, where there are "no bars" (although, sometimes, I surely would like a non-non-alcoholic drink). Biggest problem is that so few people can actually communicate with one.
http://www.americanmessaging.net/paging/index.asp
The Biro Zillionaire?
He cleaned up on the Pager Market.
and the Apple III and Newton market.
Zaphod also created the UMPC market by giving Negoponte a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster.
Now the Big Z is cleaning up on XO's.
Thats right you heard it first on Slashdot.
All your Pagers belong to him.
Facebook is a woodpecker tapping on the skull of Humanity, Forever.
Look out for Symbian phones. Most Nokia N or E-series phones have many different applications available that allow you to do all sorts of things with SMS. From spam filtering to conversation management and more.
I use a Nokia E90 and find that its probably the most powerful cellphone I have ever used. I have an iTouch and can't imagine trying to use it for anything beyond music/video and the occasional browsing. If the browser on my E90 isn't enough, I can use an application called Joiku Spot to share the HSDPA connection on the E90 with the iTouch via wifi, or just connect to a PC/Laptop via Bluetooth, USB or even InfraRed and use HSDPA that way.
The E-Series phones all offer a free application from Nokia called MfE (Mail for Exchange) that allows you to access Exchange 2000 through to 2007. There are other companies out there offering their own versions that offer even more feature than the basic MfE from Nokia.
There are Blackberry client for the Nokia E series phones so if you currently have push services from Blackberry, you can continue to use them on your Nokia. Probably the most significant difference would be the cameras. N-Series tend to have better cameras at higher resolutions (anywhere up to 8MP) where as the E-series average 3.2MP cameras.
Many of the phones have built in GPS and include Nokia Maps, but it also works equally well with Google Maps for Mobile. Right down to turn by turn route assistance using the GPS.
Symbian based cell phones have been around since 2001 when Nokia released the first 7650. The Symbian platform is a direct descendant of the old Psion devices. It is mature. It is stable. It has years of user feedback. It just works. There is a very large application base available for it out there.
Oh, and the best feature for me has been the version of Python Nokia released for their E and N-series phones along with an API that allows you to hook in to nearly every aspect of the phone, from the GPS, camera, OpenGL, through to pulling data from the calendar or the messaging platforms among others.
The most paranoid, yet strangely compelling, Python script I like is one that works as a kind of panic button. You load the app and it immediately takes a photo of whatever the camera is aimed at, sends a MMS message (or email, or SMS) with your current location from the cell tower while it waits till it has a GPS lock and includes that photo if possible. Once it has GPS lock, it will send GPS coords via SMS every X (edit the script to set, defaults to 180) seconds and then will also call a designated number to play back a pre-recorded message, then use text-to-speech to give the GPS coordinates on that call. It can then call emergency services and play that same message for them. If it can't get GPS lock (say you're in a building or whatever) then it will just use cell towers it can detect so that there is at least some method of tracing you.
All from a python script running on a cellphone. You can find it on the Nokia developer forums wiki. Because its a script, you can modify it to suit your needs and location if you want. Nokia's Python API is so straight forward that you can easily add features of your own.
You could probably even write a Python script to manage your SMS messages exactly as you want them to be dealt with if you know even a small amount of Python.
Good places to start are community sites like allaboutsymbian.com or my-symbian.com. Or you can check out the S60.com blogs and sites.
There are a lot of devices from Nokia now. E-series are targetted more at Enterprise users where as the N-series are more consumer market devices, but can still do everything an E-series device can do.
Our company use them for two very good reasons:
1. Coverage is much better than mobile phones - less black spots.
2. We use a group page so all the engineers receive any page that comes through.
YMMV
Since our kids are old enough to take themselves out to friends, or round the local area it has often been a pain to find them when required (meal times, bedtimes etc).
I would love a cheap, small pager for each of them: no worries about it getting nicked or what else they use if for etc like a cellphone. It does not even have to carry a message: beeping means time to come home (or phone in).
Size/form is the critical factor: eg integrated into a watch so it is not left at home, or on a friends floor !!
Pretty much all doctors still use them. Why?
1) great reception - I often get pages way inside buildings, where cellphones have no hope of working
2) Less intrusive. I get the info, but can respond to it when I choose. I guess you could call screen, but don't always know when to do that.
3) batteries last for several months
4) Loud common ring tones, strong vibrate mode. Pagers tend to have common ring tones, which different phones do not.Easier to differentiate in a noisy setting if your pager is going off.
Sure they are an older tech, and not "cool", but they are still very useful, and better than a phone in many cases.
My hospital uses Unication text pagers - google it.
..........FULL STOP.
Oi, you! I patched qpage to include username support, and I've emailed you THREE TIMES with my patch, and you never included it! I deserve to be heard!
Alas, most of the world is using "sendpage" now, which is a bit easier to use, but.. argh.. I don't want to become the sole maintainer of a qpage fork :-D
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
Volunteer firemen still have pagers, and a friend whose wife was extremely ill was issued a pager by the medical service which was taking care of her - so pagers do still exist. But they may all be privately-run and not by telephone companies ...
How overweight does one have to be to *not* notice the BlackBerry vibrating when it's tucked against one's person?
there's no way to tell from the caller id if it's some annoying luser or somebody you should actually talk to until you answer the call and then it's too late
No, it's not. You're on a mobile phone. You can always start asking "Hello? Hello? Is there anybody? HELLO!" two or three seconds after picking up the call and then hang up. If they call again, do the same thing. How are they to prove that you weren't in an area with bad reception?
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
"We all have cell phones, so come on - let's get real."
A song practically writes itself from there.
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
I am a volunteer with the SES (Australian state emergency service, similar to civil defense agencies) and we still use pagers (as well as text messages, which also get forwarded to email!). My pager is made by Motorola.
Although it is more convenient to just carry a mobile phone, there is a danger that text messages if the network is congested for there to be a significant (and sometimes detrimental) delay. On two occasion last year or early this year, texts didn't get delivered for a whole day.
Pagers are instant, but if your pager is not in a reception area (in a tunnel or whatever) then there is the danger of completely missing the message.
Anyway, paging services are usually independent of telecoms.
Yes, you can send alerts such as server down needy of attention to your mobile etc. The problem I've with mobile networks is delivery is not always guaranteed and for some businesses that is not acceptable however are oblivious that some mobile networks don't guarantee delivery unless you pay big bucks. There is also the possibility that someone "oncall" is out of range. This is why pagers are more reliable no matter how daggy they might look.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Am I the only one that thought by pagers, we were talking about more, less and company?
I'm not a pager guy, but have used them and know pager guys. Also, have played with old pager gear as a staring point for some ham radio projects.
Pagers used high power (300 watt) transmitters, and if you wanted to cover a decent area, several of them, synchronized to prevent distorted signals in the area where their coverage patterns overlapped. They were known for their tendency to interfere with other systems, no matter how well they were maintained. It was an expensive way to make not much money.
Profit margins were low, and churn was always a problem. Companies went in and out of business, larger companies consolidated the smaller companies, but, in the end, Nextel and cellular technology gave you two-way communication at essentially the same monthly rate.
Basically, paging companies were made economically obsolete by advances in technology.
There are "micro" paging systems still in use at restaurants, hospitals and companies, but the high power transmitters on the hill are pretty much gone, replaced with cell sites.
Did anyone stop to ask the cell phone haters if they had such devices "back in their days"?
It's ok to be adverse to cell phones, it's ok to long for the pager days, but the pager functionality is *completely integrated* in the cell phone system, so are they asking that we "burn them all", or are they really whining about not being able to transition?
My phone has a silent mode. It has the option to disconnect an incoming call. It has the option to tell my service provider to never, ever, forward a call to voicemail *whatsoever*!
If I'm busy, I can pretty much tell from the preview of the text message alone, whether I need to read and see if something needs my attention, and if not, the combination of that and caller ID provides even more clue...
But sure, if you want, you can always try to cram a cell phone size display into the strangely crippled device that a pager is, and see if you can market it. If no one has done it before, I don't know, but I wouldn't invest in anything of the sort...
Bottom line: If you need the limitations of a pager, your phone *and you* in combination are up to the task easily, but instead, you can just whine as me in this comment, and then go blaming someone else for your failure to RTFM...
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
It's not just pagers. I find myself looking at cell phones and wondering where there's just a simple phone with no bells, whistles, touch displays, etc. Has to be durable as well and get good signal anywhere instead of having power worked to all kinds of unused features.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
and have a pager
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
Not only miss the reliable, economical, nonintrusive pagers, also wonder if anybody out there still has the eight digit accompanying code to convey a message, 11 who, 22 what, 33 where, 44 when? Thanks!
I see pagers in bulk at work all the time coming and going, try calling a sales rep instead of looking on the web pages.
Pagers will be a smaller profit item so they wont push them like the old days.
And i agree, 90% of the people on call need nothing more then a simple ( and cheap ) pager.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Pagers, especially as used in the technology sector, are usually tools of exploitation. If you are not getting paid properly (meaning extravagantly, since you have to arrange your life around getting called away to work at any time) for the hours during which you are on call, then you are a slave.
i dunno wtf you need a pager for if you have a cell phone. Get a nice cell that does all the bells and whistles YOU desire and you're gtg.
There are many hospitals that still won't allow cell phones around their equipment and still have bans on having cell phones in the hospital. However, pagers don't cause the interference that cell phones do. Thus, pagers are still important in some areas. If you work in a hospital, a pager is a handy thing to still have.
At my last job, we used pagers rather than Cel phones. They worked pretty well. I belive the company we went through was Penncel (or pensel, cant remember). My current job is also an oncall position. We use Verizon wireless phones. My current phone is a samsung SCH-A930. Works very well as a pager. Has a few loud ring tones, and verizon's firmware lets you set the alert on text messages such that it will re-alert if you don't ack it. That being said, there's a good chance i'll be switching to a PDA type phone in the future. I hope i can find one that works as well as a pager, as it does a pda.
If you tune in to 930 MHz or so, and hook up a flex decoder, like say, winflex, to your radio's discriminator output, you'll see quite a few businesses still use pagers. Hospitals, car services, banks, big-IT like Ixx, Hx, and the government all send pages out cleartext when their systems are down or offline.
Silicon Heaven.
Look into BBAlerts to re-alert you on your msges, and then look for a loud pager like tone online. Sorry blackberry is much better than a pager in my opinion.
I have been fighting this idea for quite a while now. Unfortunately, it is a losing battle. I work for a health care provider. We still have thousands of pagers in use. We use them for all kinds of alerting on the clinical side. People like their pagers for form factor, reliability, familiarity and the tools that are used. They are very hard to compete with.
The pager is still smaller than most cell phones. Some cell phones come close in size, but are hard to use when they get that small. I am not sure I could get anyone to agree that a cell phone that is the same size pager is better than the pager. The pager has less buttons to deal with at that size and usually the screen is larger.
The pager has been the gold standard for reliability. Five years ago, no one questioned how quick a page was received. Everyone expected within seconds of sending the page would be received. They also knew coverage would penetrate any structure anywhere in their area. Neither of these two things are doable with SMS without special measures taken.
People have been using pagers in one form or another for 20+ years. The biggest change is adding 3-4 more buttons and alpha-numeric screens. I don't have to train anyone on how to use a pager. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I do need to train people on how to use a phone.
The other point in their favor that I had a hard time dealing with is the tools. People like to dial a number and press digits. It is quick and reliable, they don't need a PC to do it. We also have small terminals, that have an LCD display and a keyboard with a modem line, we call them "alphamates". Recently we tried to ban them and we had a revolt on our hands. The main problem was that the idea of having to alt-tab to a browser and use a web form to send a page was unacceptable by our users. As a technology person this seemed to be just whining. The more valid argument I heard was if they were not logged in, and they had something critical going on that they needed to page for. They would have to find a PC and login, which could take minutes to send a page versus seconds with the alphamate.
As has been mentioned above the economics of paging has now made this service unreliable. We have had reports of pages taking 10+ minutes to be received. I have heard of processes being changed to accommodate for the slower pages. In our business this is unacceptable. We have a private in building paging system for super critical pages, but this usually means someone carries two pagers, one for those critical on-site pages and one for off site use.
We have looked into SMS, but until we can get some reliability in coverage and delivery times it just won't work for us. The carriers all say they can provide a special connection to better insure delivery, but no SLAs will be tied to it. We would also have to look at a distributed antenna system to make sure we have 100% coverage in all areas in our buildings, which we are doing anyway. It still leaves our users homes as possible gaps though. There is still the issue of the alphamate as well. Sure people could text from their own phones, but you try telling that to a techno-phobic health care provider who is still struggling with their PC. I don't want to be ageist won't go into this much, the average age of a nurse.
I use the iPhone's "Alarm" ringtone (at max volume) as an alarm clock. I don't dare set it as the sound for anything incoming, because then it might happen when I'm around other people, and it tends to make everyone else in the room jump and look panicky.
(It's an "Alarm" tone of the sort you might hear at your local nuke plant if cooling fails. Good stuff.)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Get Blackberry alerts (makes your blackberry ping you if you haven't answered it)
http://www.handango.com/catalog/ProductDetails.jsp;jsessionid=37239925D458872C11BCFC9520E8B5B0.worker6?storeId=2218&platformId=5&productId=199266&WT.mc_Id=programId11
Also I recorded my skytel pager and then set it as a custom ringtone on my berry before giving the skytel pager back.
Vermifax
Logout
I've had the unfortunate pleasure of living my life on call for the last few years. Without a doubt, the most critical app I use is a little product called PhoneAlarm. It's designed for Windows Mobile devices and can be used to set up things like repeating alerts for different types of messages, different alert types depending on things like sender address, and automatic profile switching (vibrate, loud, etc) based on rules I can set up. I can tell it to use one alert for messages from my monitoring app and a different alert for messages from friends, go to vibrate at 8am and loud mode at 5pm, and repeat the alert every x number of seconds basically until I acknowledge it and clear it.
Ive used lots of apps over the last 5 years, but this is one of the few that I can say I have used consistently over that entire time.
If you have Blackberry Enterprise Server (and access to it or the admin) you could configure Nagios pages in a special (tier 1) category, and change the behavior on those (keep ringing and vibrating)
plenty of pagers to be had. You just need to not fail at google. Or the obvious .com address.
you mean that thing that rattles around in my left desk drawer occasionally? i suppose its just going to keep rattling...damned if iknow what it does.
Good people go to bed earlier.
My dad had one of those REALLY old voice pagers that had the loudest beep, and then whoever was on the other side spoke through it - except that it was hard to tell who was on the other end because it sounded worse than a drive-through speaker box.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Heaven
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I recently got a Motorokr rokr z6 and it's perfect in the paging regard.
1) It's intended to be a music player so it has a nice loud speaker for ring tones. (no way you'll miss it)
2) If you receive a notification (missed call, voicemail, text, etc.) it will remind you of it every few minutes with a vibration or tone depending on preference, until you acknowledge it.
Have you tried one of the newer BlackBerry models (Bold)? They have some pretty ridiculously loud ring tones. Like, there would have to be something really really wrong with you to sleep through one of these things going off. There are quiet tranquil ones for times when you don't want the...urgency...that some of the louder ring tones offer. I use mine for an alarm clock and damned if it doesn't yank me out of bed wondering wtf is going on every morning.
i dunno wtf you need a pager for if you have a cell phone. Get a nice cell that does all the bells and whistles YOU desire and you're gtg.
Because sometimes you need to be paged.
Also, sending a page from a modem is trivial, just dial the number, pause, and dial whatever number or code you want. I can even program the ancient phone system at work to do that when someone calls after hours. If you've got a way to do that for an arbitrary cell phone provider for free, I'd love to hear about it (otherwise, you play guess the email-to-sms gateway, then get a mangled SMS with all sorts of useless header junk before you get to the text messa... which gets cut off because the headers filled up the SMS character limit).
A few cell phone providers do have "press X to page the person" in the voicemail system. Maybe this would work as long as the person remembered never to answer when the automated paging system was calling.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
http://www.usamobility.com/products/messaging/ They do our pagers - they work great.
My company's product (plug alert!), Reliable Response Notification http://www.reliableresponse.net, is an IT emergency notification product. Essentially, it's a paging server. It handles this by giving you multiple notification options, including voice notification which calls you over the POTS. It also can be configured to retry you after 5, 10, or 15 minutes if you don't respond in time, or escalate up a chain if you happen to sleep through or miss your page. With Blackberries, we've had good luck using GTalk, which for some reason beeps louder than email or SMS.
Of course, we also support pagers. Since pagers tend to be a little more expensive and a little more rare, it's common for our customers to have one "on-call" pager which they hand off to the on-call person. After the on-call pager, we put a rotating list of backup on-call staff, in case the primary misses the page.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
I used to have an iPhone and had the same Nagios behavior. Every nagios SMS was a separate conversation.
I have an Android G1 and the conversations are in 1 thread now, a lot easier to manage.
What is an iTouch? Do you mean an iPhone?
Gregor
I work for a hospital, and we have a heavy reliance on pagers. Likely for all the reasons you listed. We certainly don't want a doctor missing their page. You should be able to get a nice 2 way pager with nationwide service cheap as dirt with no contracts in this day and age.
We use a company called USA Mobility but I think they offer only corporate solutions, not individual paging accounts. For an individual solution... yeah, I don't know. About the only people who need an individual pager are drug dealers (no account needed, harder to trace than a cell phone).
Might not be stylish but you will not miss your calls
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.13236
.
That's the only one I know about...
I used to work for a hospital and they are pretty much the only group left.
___ I don't respond to Anonymous Cowards, and I Never Mod them UP.
One-way pagers are still used a lot by people who work in secure buildings. The building's shielding completely blocks (intentionally) any RF in or out, including cell signals. But you can "whitelist" the pager signal from the satellite by installing a repeater on the roof of the building that retransmits into the building.
Metrocall Paging was the best in the industry. They merged with Arch Paging to become USAMobility. They have the best coverage and pricing available. I do this for a large health system in Western PA and used to work for the paging company. Pagers have better penetration than cell phones due to many towers sending the message out at once instead on one to one of a cell phone. The drawback is a one way pager is one way and if it misses a page, you ain't gettin it at all.
Believe it or not, you can't just bring a 1W radio transmitter with you everywhere.
I'm posting as Anonymous Coward because I'm going to say some things that I don't want traced back to me.
My company has a pager that our on call person uses. We rotate on call duties every week and the person on call gets the pager. The pager has a guaranteed service where the pages are guaranteed to get sent within a certain time frame. We also send SMS alerts to cell phones, but nobody in the USA guarantees timely SMS delivery and we have had SMS messages get delayed as long as one day. Hence the pager so the on call person knows about problems.
We're using American Messaging (http://www.americanmessaging.net) and currently are having issues with them. They have twice disconnected our service for "non-payment" this year. The first time was a mistake on their part (we did pay on time) and they punished us for their mistake. Nice. We are currently disconnected and they are claiming non-payment and we are trying to see if it's another case of them dropping the ball and punishing us for their mistake. We have to have reliable pages so if it turns out that American Messaging has disconnected us unfairly, we are probably going to look for another carrier. We simply cannot have a paging service that cuts us off with no warning for non-payment when the problem is that they are too incompetent to process our payment correctly. To be fair, we have not yet determined who is to blame in the current situation, but since they cut us off in the past due to their own incompetence, it doesn't give us a warm, fuzzy feeling that they have just cause this time.
gewglie gewglie
http://www.pagersonline.com/
With a shared physical pager, there's no ambiguity about who's on-call.
A physical pager must be handed to the next person in the on-call rotation before you're off-call.
So, you're motivated to make sure the on call transfer takes place.
When the on-call rotation is among a group of people in the same place and who see each other in person occasionally, these can be serious benefits.
this site should steer you in the right direction.
those phone go off like bombs lol. being when they ring the use the 2 way loud speaker. as for pagers they lost there spotlight to cellphones. you cant instantly respond on a pager you always needed to find a phone with a cell thats not the case. anf even if you dont thers always the voicemail for a message or even a text message.
Or how about he simply has a crappy phone.
My Nokia E62 can wake the dead in ringing and I can set it to annoy me for 2 hours after a email or sms has been received.
he does not need a pager, he needs a non-crappy phone. Blackberry's are made for trendy executives that dont want to be bothered. they like the pathetic vibrate and the pleasing tone that says "please pay attention to me."
My E62 on the other hand screams, "I'm trying to piss you off, come deal with me NOW!!!" If set to loudest volume I can hear the alerts and ringing through my pillow over my head 2 rooms away.
Plus the tools I get from running symbian, I get cool apps that can record phone calls, only ring on specific numbers after hours, etc... Oh and if you really gotta have it, it works with blackberry push. and if you have it debranded, it's as fast as the e61i after you remove the crappy cingular firmware.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
http://shop.ebay.com/items/_W0QQ_nkwZPagerQQ_armrsZ1QQ_fromZQQ_mdoZ
Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody... - Dick Armey
You just have to remember who the pager providers are..
Try
Mobilfone (dot com)
pagenet (dot com)
A similar situation happened to me last week. I went to my local Toyota dealer. I went to their Accesories department. NOT ONE buggy whip was there!
Where have all of the buggy whips gone?
We use the Motorola Advisor Gold. They are wonderful devices - never break (I've known employees who have dropped them in the toilet and they still functioned afterwards), have a clear screen, good backlite, strong vibrate, and continue to vibrate if you do not acknowledge them. Great little tool for knowing when the assembly line is down.
The Blackberry probably can be configured with a different ringtone.
My Windows Mobile phone (AT&T Tilt) was configured for a long time with a ringer that was a semi-high-pitched piercing series of beeps - you could hear it from across the building at work if I forgot to put it on vibrate.
I updated the ROM and the new default ringtone is some pleasing Microsoft melody, I really need to change it back...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
1151176-926312-60035-1113-11101170-53170-540127-1773552635-7415-11124 74353-16105-111174-743112-6377-9401735....50-5901730
... That is Chuck Norris!
And if Chuck Norris is behind you, it is too late, cause he is paging you with a roundhouse kick to the head!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Mostly Skytel. Commodity bill per one-way pager is about $32 per month.
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
http://www.americanmessaging.net/paging/index.asp
I believe verizon sold/spun off their paging service to American Messaging. We use still use pagers for notifications.
On the plus side, not only are they reliable, but my pager gives me some serious street cred, Every thinks I'm a drug dealer, or still living in 8th grade.
If you are that attached to technology of yore, get a pager beep ringtone and set that for work.
Q.E.D.
Please don't ever, ever do this. What will most likely happen is that one of your children will be playing with your phone and will press the OMG BIG RED BUTTON and set off the script.
If you're actually wealthy enough to have a serious risk of being kidnapped, hire your own private security firm and have the emergency message go to them. Hell, if you're actually wealthy enough to have a serious risk of being kidnapped, hire a real security guard to protect you.
In any case, that's a very cool script.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
What's a pager, Mom?
Try visiting any cell phone store (Verizon, Cingular, etc.) near a hospital. Most MDs are still required to carry standard pagers. As a result these stores are VERY likely to carry high quality pagers and plans for them.
I had a pager for a while for when I was developping some remote-sensing application that reported to a pager, and I needed it for testing.
When I was through with testing it, I kept the pager for a few weeks. I was in the process of moving at that time, and my boss asked for the pager back. I did not remembered where I put it, but I assured my boss that I would find it, that it was not lost.
But since it was on vibrate, I would not hear it when I dialed it. However, it was the kind that would keep on beeping/vibrating every 5 minutes until you acknowledge the page by pressing a button on it.
A few days later, I needed something I remembered putting at the bottom of a suitcase, so I only crack it open and insert my arm all the way to the bottom, feeling for what I needed.
At this precise moment, the beeper decides to go for it's little vibration... So I found the pager totally by chance... :)
He probably means an iPod Touch
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
What's a modem?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I was recently looking into getting a pager for a elderly relative of mine. Still gets around OK but can't be bothered to carry the super-simple cell phone we purchased and set up for her (not to mention on and charged.) Plus she's been known to leave her landline phone off the hook once in awhile.
I figure a pager would work for all the reasons listed before - small enough to fit in her purse, loud as hell, battery lasts for months. (And as we're the only ones who'd be paging her, she know who it's from.)
I guess I'll look into Skytel - do they have a consumer-level pricing option? Any other recommendations out there?
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
And why can't I find a decent telegraph office for my telegrams? Where have all the telegrams gone?
[signature]
I work in a health care environment. We use pagers to receive notifications about patients. Sometimes you just need a pager and not a whole phone.
I would think he means iPod Touch
After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint...
Did it occur to you to try Google? What's left of the pager market is tiny, and the big telecoms can't be bothered with it.
I'm the system admin for our technology problem ticket system. One of the things we still have going is a server with a couple of multimodems and paging software.
Almost every cell phone provider still supports the TAP (or TAPI) protocol but sometimes you really have to lean on them to get the information. Most of the phone jockeys on tech support don't even know what it is.
Since I refuse to wear the electronic leash I don't have paging on my cell phone. But I did for a while and the messages came through entirely differently than an e-mail or SMS. I believe that included the 'pay attention to me' features you're asking about.
I don't get asked about it much any more but occasionally senior management would ask why we still had this in place when cell phones now get e-mail. My answer was always "And how are you supposed to get an e-mail that the e-mail system is down?" A couple of blinks later and they understood why I keep it running.
Try your local multi-carrier store and see what they have. They're probably your best bet when it comes to finding a decent pager and plan.
Anecdote time, from a time not all that long ago (to me). An office building wanted to keep their various floors/departments aware of issues in a timely manner. The final solution was pagers set to beep and vibrate in acrylic holders on the walls, kind of like a thermostat. When there was a problem that area needed to know about they sent a page. Since it would make all kinds of noise someone always went to check the pager. It was also routine to change the batteries every month. Worked fantastic, very cheap. I could see this still working as a solution, which is why I keep it in the mental filing cabinet.
Before you sign up for a pager service, check the coverage map. We have used Skytel for years and their pages used to bounce of satellites and provide better coverage than cell phones, which was one reason we used a pager. Now they seem to use a local system and their coverage maps are very poor. We checked other pager services and they have the same problem.
We ended up signing up for a cell service which we use as a pager (it arrives as a text message). The Motorola Razr can be configured to beep loudly until you clear the 'page'.
We still have a couple pagers in service at my office. Occasionally, each of us have to carry it around all week in case it goes off because one of the servers failed and the primary support guy didn't respond (so almost never). Mostly we end up mistreating this thing and bemoaning the added pocket clutter. Handoff day is the best part about it. Mostly it's a conversation piece out of the office. Waitresses at restaurants are either suprised or actually offended that we still use pagers. I told one that the pager was VERY important & that if it went off she should drop everything and leave the city right then. Get out as quickly as possible and don't tell anyone you were warned. One phone call later: free meal.
When will they ever learn?
eom
I must be missing something... if vibrate isn't waking you up, then why the hell don't you have your phone on ring? My Blackberry with one of the standard rings is enough to wake the entire house. If you don't know how to set 'important' phone calls on your Blackberry to filter unwanted noise, then maybe it is too much technology for you, and you should get a pager.
...is Message Alerts, http://www.webmessenger.com/products/mablackberry.htm
In a nutshell:
- set up a custom BlackBerry profile that is silent for incoming email
- use MessageAlerts to create rules for notification of various message
Rules can trigger LED flashes, vibration, or tones. Different rules can have different tones. Rules can be set to repeat the alert until acknowledged. The BB is not as loud as my old Motorola/SkyTel pager, so I might not wake up as quickly, but I will wake up for urgent emails.
This simple app changed by BlackBerry from a total annoyance (had to check it every time I got an email in case it was urgent) to a nice replacement for my pager -- urgent system monitor alarms nag me until I read them, and will wake me up -- and the other stuff doesn't. Simple checkboxes allow you to toggle rules -- enable them when you're on call, disable them for blissful silence when you're not.
You can even set different rules to vibrate for different counts & durations, like a silent vibrating Morse code, so with the BB on your belt or in your pocket you can have some idea who the email's from.
Seriously, download the free trial of Message Alerts and see if it doesn't solve your problem easier & cheaper than adding another device to your utility belt.
There's a service called Youmail (over at, wait for it, youmail.com) that does basically the same thing, but they have a free plan. The free plan's transcription service isn't as accurate as the paid plan, but it's quite acceptable (and sometimes pretty good for a laugh). And they can text you, email you, and even attach an MP3 of the recording.
Here's a typical example of the free transcription:
"So what it's jim the reason I called use I was i'm trying to figure out if maybe you actually picked up my day planner when you were here last time. I'm going crazy because it can't find it if I lose it um. Really shop so wanna choose maybe scooped it up and stuck in your bag and. What did you check your bag before you had it over anyway talk to it or not by. "
So when I get this message in my email box (I use a Treo, so it arrives within about a minute of my missing or ignoring the call) I know it's not a call about the SQL server going down or the RAID filseverver making funny noises, and I can get back to him when I choose to. Plus in this case, I can check my bag for his daytimer before I even call him back.
Why I was marked a Troll for mentioning Youmail earler when I said basically the same thing as Feepness is beyond me...
Nice description!
Regarding the pager-feature request, WinMo phones also have free apps that should handle all his paging needs.
And returning to your list of cool, Symbian features: I don't have a ton of fancy stuff on my WinMo phone right now, but one feature that I find pretty cool is a free (of course) app that allows me to 1) find my phone if it's lost or stolen by someone who doesn't turn it off and 2) track my enemies (as long as I'm willing to sacrifice my phone). If I send it a text message with my security key, it receives the message silently and suppresses the message notification window. Then it deletes the message, activates the GPS, and sends me text messages with lat and long position updates. Also it can be set up to take and send periodic photos.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
enough said
I rarely see anyone wearing a watch these days either. The clock on the cell phone is more accurate and doesn't require setting. Of course, when you are outside the range of cell service it can be a problem.
Sorry about that last post. Apparently I have a free plan that's been grandfathered into the new pay plan schemes for transcriptions.
It's still cheaper than phonetag.com, but it isn't free.
My apologies.
hire someone to follow you around and jab you in the ribs with a sharp stick.
one jab is enough, and there is no "sleep" mode.
http://www.whuddafug.com
If you're using AT&T's email-to-SMS gateway, use number@mobile.mycingular.com rather than number@txt.att.net. The mycingular.com address always uses the same sending number, so it appears as a single conversation that can be deleted with one swipe, rather than one per message.
Not sure if other providers have a similar setup, but this one saved me from ditching the iPhone entirely. Now if only I could use my own custom SMS ringtones....
Into Hershey's Pagers 'n Cream! A mouthful of pagers in every bite.
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=pagers
I can see how you wouldn't want a bunch of "work" messages mixed in with your personal one....
DRUG DEALER!
I'm a volunteer search and rescue k-9 handler in Virginia. Two years ago, my team got rid of pagers and went to text message alerts via cell phones for a number of reasons:
1. Pager coverage had gotten really crappy. Most of us live in the country. We would frequently miss pages because we were out of range when at home. No pager service provided the rural coverage that we require. Shoot, I would miss pages when I was in the server room at work in town.
2. Pagers are an all-or-nothing medium. By that, I mean that you either get the page or you don't. Pages would frequently come through garbled and you would have no clue what the message was. With a cell phone, if you happen to be out of range when a message is sent, you will get it when you get back in coverage. With pagers, you don't ever get the message if you are not in coverage.
3. Dispatch has become much more streamlined by using cell phones. We can send out much more info in fewer messages with text messaging. The group members can reply to the text message instead of having to call dispatch. This has been a huge win as we can now tell the Department of Emergency Management how many dogs we have responding within 15 minutes or so compared to 30 - 45 minutes with the pagers. This is due to the dispatchers' phones not being tied up with everyone calling at once. And since VDEM can now request us by sending an email to a mail list, we know immediately what type of dogs are needed and where the search is. No more waiting on dispatch to call DEM and then page us with the info.
4. I have a WinMo phone and I have a specific ring tone (an mp3 of an old submarine klaxon) set up for text messages that come from group members and VDEM. If I happen to sleep through it (it's pretty damn loud), the dog knows that sound means she is likely going to work and she will wake me up.
Pagers definitely still have their place, but text messaging offers much better coverage and more versatility.
there are some useful iPhone SMS apps that provide filtering and unique tone alerts, but it requires that you jailbreak (which is very easy!)
American Paging took over Verizon's paging business. I had a two way pager back in the day, before you could get cell data service, before Ricochet even (then I had Ricochet). 900mhz pagers use "Flex" at about 1200 or 2400 bps... two way pagers transmit on the same basic protocol, dubbed "ReFlex". Anyway, back on topic, a nice service paging offers that I haven't seen elsewhere yet is inexpensive operators. For a few bucks a month, someone answers an 800 number for me, types up messages, and pages me with them. I can immediately and discretely filter messages without imposing on clients to "text me", and clients are less likely to try to yank my chain, so to speak. Having a person between me and them gets rid of the impression that they're able to fill up my voice mail box or otherwise abuse me. I recommend it.
-scott
I have had the same issue with my iPhone. It is especially bad with the original iPhone in that the speaker is much weaker.
Sadly, I was using number@mobile.mycingular.com and switched to number@txt.att.net, after number@mobile.mycingular.com stopped working for a few days. Oddly sometimes number@txt.att.net doesn't come in the single message way.
The reason number@txt.att.net does it the way it does is that it allows the sms server to track individual messages, hence allowing replies.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
Pagers cost too much for the abilities they give you. They cost as much or more than a cellphone (well, depending on how much you use the cellphone, but it only costs more if you use it for things the pager won't do), but you can't make outgoing calls, can't receive very much information incoming either (typically just a short numeric code), can't store information (like phone numbers) on them, can't open them up and use them as a light when you need to see to put your key in the keyhole, and so on and so forth.
So most of the people who used to use pages have gone over to other solutions, mainly cellphones.
If you must be reachable all the time, then these days you can just get a cellphone that supports per-caller ringtones and set a custom (possibly loud and annoying) one for when certain numbers (e.g., work) call you. If you don't want to be annoyed by other stuff, you can set everybody else's ringtone to a quiet hum, or even a famous John Cage number, and then check your messages when you feel like it.
There *are* people who still use pagers. The local obstetrician where I live uses one, for instance. So I know you can still get them. But are they worth it, that's another question.
Personally I'm glad that I don't need to be reachable absolutely all the time, but that's a separate issue.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Google Android in the future.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I may yet keep my current cheesy phone and use the N810 *just* for stuff that I'll access over wifi. Or I may decide to dump the phone most times and use Skype and email software instead. That's exactly my point. If you think of this thread as being about the transfer of information instead of the semi-arbitrary categories of "phone", "smartphone", "pager", or "mobile net device" then things get quite nebulous. Look at the apps discussed here. Especially the Symbian ones. Who can use what for which tasks is a question with a non-obvious answer.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
Where have all the dinosaurs gone?
Where have all the Model-T Fords gone?
Where have all Intel 286s gone?
Where have all the men's rights gone?...
The should rename "Ask Slashdot" to "I'm a freakin idiot, and can't RTFM".
You can change the behavior of the device in the Profiles menu. You likely had it set to the "Quiet" profile, which is... I realize this is hard to believe... pretty quiet. Call and Email notifications are set on vibrate, and text messages are a very quite chirp.
Now, you can set it to the "Loud" profile, which is... I realize this is hard to believe... pretty loud. It's set to both an audible and vibrating alert for email and phone calls, and text messages are a loud alert as well.
Or... OMG HOW AMAZING AND TEH LUNIX-LIKE!!!!... you can go into the profiles menu and edit their behaviors to suit how you would prefer it to behave. You can change ringtones, alter the types of alerts, etc.
All of this is, of course, in the f'ing manual... I realize that is hard to believe. Not only do Blackberries make pagers irrelevant, but you can have it perform the same way. All it takes is reading the f'ing manual. But it's probably easier to proudly display your ignorance for all teh intarweb to see.
At least up until I left IBM last May, they still issued pagers as standard equipment to any system administrator that worked at an IBM site or outsourced hosting center.
As an 'on site' admin, meaning I worked at the local IBM campus, I had a pager. I asked my manager if I could switch to cell-phone only so I didn't have to carry additional devices around. Here's the reasons he gave for why I would have a pager only.
The pager providers IBM uses are Arch Wireless and Skytel. Google 'em.
Nowadays I carry a cell phone, I work from home, and I haven't been to a data center since I took this job four months ago.
I agree. This is a problem for me too. One which I've yet to get resolved in the way I want it.
Right now I have a Skype number. If I don't answer it after so many minutes, it rings to my Cellphone, work number, and possibly some other number I'm at for the day. One number to hand out. No longer do I hand out my cellphone #, though many have it still.
My cell phone does not go to voice mail. It's not setup. My work phone does, I have no choice in that.
I was on vacation yesterday. "The Internet was down", and I got called while I was in with my Dr. Ends up the problem was with a B2B site, not us, but it's the only site a large group of users utilize. My backup did not do any research before calling. I asked for additional information and a call back. 5 minutes later, "Problem on their end" text message. The last time I was at my Dr. I got called over and over and ignored it until I was out. That didn't fly too well with my supervisors. We apparently lost tens of thousands of dollars in business because someone changed an IP address on a server without telling me, and no-one else wants to try and add it to the firewall.
I miss the old days where Cell phones and pagers did not exist. I get called while on vacation or at night because it's free (I'm wage, not hourly) and it's easy. In the old days, systems which were important after hours had staff on hand which could support them. Sure, they couldn't make system or design changes. But they could get into the systems to find the problem and fix them. Now we don't have that, we have lazy staff that play iPhone games at night.
My current method of getting rid of these calls is getting products with some resiliency so problems such as a cut T1 can auto fail over, thus no phone calls. Hardware RAID and backup PSU's in everything important. Redundant core networking. It costs more, but I think everyone benefits. But that can't solve all issues that come up at night.
We just transitioned our visiting nurses to Blackberrys with a Service from USA Mobility called Page Sync (http://www.usamobility.com/PAGESYNC/) It has a small app that displays the "page" on the BB screen which must be acknowledged, and comes with the old school Motorola pager tone. I took the tone, doubled the length to 24 seconds and increased the volume using MP3Gain. On a blackberry as best I can tell you can only set a SMS/Email to ring three times, so 3 X 24 seconds means the thing screams like a banshee for at least a minute solid. This service allows us to keep the pager number which has the benefit of our visiting nurses not having to give their phone numbers to patients and families (who often call months after being discharged or who leave urgent calls on nurses voice mail when they should be calling 911 or our dispatch). only downside is the page is sent via email and is subject to RIM availability and the same signal reliance of the carriers mobile network.
Get a second phone and make sure it is loud. Configure it with the loudest tone for messages, best vibration setting and not to accept incoming calls.
There, thats a very nice pager that you can even use to answer the pages. Just make sure your girlfriend don't send text messages to this one!
-- dnl
"If you have a cell phone or pager, please turn them off. And if you have a pager, please get a cell phone."
I still have one too, through a place called American Wireless. Up in far Northern Cali, cell service is terrible, especially in the hilly regions. We don't have cell service in our house, which is in the middle of a subdivision in a medium-sized city. However, the pager works every time, no fail. I don't know if it is still true, but they used to be satellite-based which would explain why it even works when I'm in the driving through the middle of a mountain range.
-brain
I don't know what they wanted, you should call them.
My impression is that the big cell providers don't bother with pagers anymore because the profit margin isn't big enough for the corporate bloat. I think pagers are now a niche market, handled by pager-specific companies. That said, as a sysadmin until I got laid off recently, my pager was serviced though USA Mobility. They do local and national, one-way and two-way. My specific pager was a Motorola T900. No five-nines reliability (I was once unable to receive pages at my house for several days - they would show up as soon as I drove a couple miles to a different location though, so I assume it was a transmitter issue) so I had to set up my cell phone as a backup channel. But otherwise it worked well enough.
One thing about pagers, though - I got paged enough that I came to absolutely hate the pager noise. I used to have it set to alert with a single beep tone, but my stress would spike whenever I heard that tone on TV, the radio, or wherever. Then I chose a rising/falling tone (what's the musical term for that?) which worked for a while until a recent commercial showing somebody trapped in an elevator while everybody's pager/phone goes off around them. That specific tone was played and it bothered the hell out of me. Oh well, I don't have to worry about that until my next job I guess.
I have a cell phone, but there's no coverage at my house. Pagers work though.
Since there's no coverage, I have to turn my phone off when I go home, or the batteries are dead in 3 or 4 hours as the thing tries in vain to connect to a network (there's barely enough signal there for it to keep trying). Once I turn it off, I usually forget to turn it back on again. As a result, my phone is off for weeks at a time.
They bought me a nice Blackberry at work, I gave it back the next day. There's no point to having it.
Text messages WILL get through on my phone, in 4 or 5 hours when the conditions are just perfect. Pagers work well there though.
I found them:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/ABPub/zoom/html/2002920135.html
Just Check with the Beeper King.
I worked for AT&T I was told several times that we did in fact still sell pagers. Mostly to medical workers because pagers don't have a transmitter. They don't send signals back, and while you could set up certain cellphones to do the same thing by turning off certain optional sms features (in phones that expose such things) there are still some times when a normal phone tries to talk back to the tower. That's a big no no around medical equipment. No one that I worked with could actually tell me which part of our company could actually provide a customer with a pager. The few times I had customers ask I had to tell them "yes our company does sell them, but I don't know anyone I could get you in touch with that could get you one, I have no number for you to call, no web site. We sell them, but no one knows how to get them I'm sorry."
Papers are still quite common in medicine. I'm not entirely sure if that is an institutional resistance to change, capital expense put into setting up the system, because it works better, or just because it is a 'sufficient' system. It is the case that pagers seem to work well in an environment where you often can't immediately respond to the page (like answering the phone), but will respond shortly.
Does anyone know more?
Unfortunately, invariably at big meetings (like Grand Rounds), someone forgets to put their pager on vibrate...
"Politics is for the moment, an equation lasts eternity" -A. Einstein
sigh. ATDT8005551212,,,,8666666666,,1,,+++ATH
OK
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
http://www.usamobility.com/
I've gone thru countless skytel 2-way pagers. The reception is worse than my cell phone, it's always in 'basic service' at my desk and in quite a few other places. After 6 months or so, the antenna starts getting wonky so all you get is more and more garbled pages and duplicates, and your replies never go thru.
Theoretically one-way pagers should be more reliable than a cell phone, but... I wouldn't bother.
I work in an area where RFI can shut down or interfere with equipment and can potentially cause a dangerous situation. Cell phones and two way radios are not reasonable in such environments.
So that leaves just one option then: A one-way pager.
So they're still used to this day, they're just not frequently seen.
It's ok to be adverse to cell phones, it's ok to long for the pager days, but the pager functionality is *completely integrated* in the cell phone system, so are they asking that we "burn them all", or are they really whining about not being able to transition?
This particular FA is whin^H^H^H^Hcomplaining about the inability of his particular cell phone to not let him sleep through a page. He basically needs a really loud ring tone, and he needs to phone not to shut up until it's gotten his attention. I'm not familiar with this phone, but it wouldn't surprise me if its alert features were pretty limited.
In theory, you can get a phone that replaces your PDA, your MP3 player, your pager, your GPS, and your pocket game gadget. I don't need a pager, but until recently I had all the others. I only got rid of my PDA because it was too hard to keep it in sync with my phone — and I still find not being able to refer to my PDA while I'm talking on the phone to be a pain. As for the other functions, the phone can theoretically do all of them, but the available software just plain sucks.
Maybe some people who resist the convergent devices trend do so out of an inability to change. But I think mostly we resist because vendors don't do a very good job of converging.
If I could design my perfect cell phone, it would have very few features indeed. You obviously need a cell radio with voice and data capability. And you need bluetooth so you can integrate it with other devices. I guess you need speaker and mic so you won't have to wear one of those silly headsets. (Everytime I see one, I want to shout, "Resistance is Futile!") But that's it. Really, you don't even need a dial (90% of the time you're dialing numbers in your phone book, and that's easier from the PDA) though I suppose consumers would balk at a phone that minimalistic.
Obviously, none of you really work with semiconductors, just computers. In the semiconductor industry, pagers are rampant. I've worked with multiple customers that all issue pagers to their employees (and sometimes suppliers) so that they can stay in touch "wherever and whenever." Essentially, working in a giant Faraday cage makes cell phones difficult to depend on (not to mention "against the rules" when you are surrounded by confidential information. Pagers with in-the-building repeaters to get the signal to everyone are the only way to go. Carbon_tet
Carbon_Tet
-I need your pagers.
All of y'all, the whole crew.
-Who else?
-Sterling, Cass and Manny.
-All right, go get them shits.
-How am I gonna talk to my girl?
-Talk to your hand, nigger,
that's the only girl you got.
No more.... Get out of here.
Just get the fuck out of here, man.
No more pagers.
Touts, lookouts, off the air, all right?
Nobody gonna use these cell phones
except for you and Bodie...
and y'all don't say shit on these,
you understand me?
We got the numbers
and we the only niggers that need them.
Not your moms, not your girl, nobody.
You feel me?
You use these phones to set up a meet,
go to that meet...
and talk face to face, period.
-So no more pay phones?
-You deaf? I said no phones.
-How I'm gonna reach y'all?
-All right, top number's for re-ups...
second number's for muscle.
You need me, hit me on the third number.
Learn them shits, then throw that shit away.
-You doing this in the towers, too?
-Doing it everywhere.
Pagers, pay phones is dead.
All right?
-Yeah.
Because, as we all know, technology is circular."
Damn,that reminds me of my trip to the doctor's office the other day. I'm sitting there waiting for my checkup,when a little old ladies phone goes off. I guess the old girl was a little hard of hearing and the son got tired of dealing with it,because he had it set to play this message: "MOM PICK UP THE PHONE! YOUR PHONE IS RINGING,PICK UP THE DAMNED PHONE ALREADY!" Needless to say we all about died laughing at the thing. And you could tell exactly where in the building she was because every 30 minutes or so we'd here "PICK UP THE DAMNED PHONE ALREADY!" blaring down the halls. Damned funny.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A few years ago I used Skytel (skytel.com) in Costa Rica. Even though phone service became somewhat better, and GSM appeared next to TDMA, there are still places where phones do not reach.
There is another pager service we used here just a year ago, but that is a local only service (no US coverage as far as I know)
While I really-really hate to have a pager, I know that I would be missing it if I was still running networking services or hosting where you need to be paged. No I am mostly developing, so there are no emergencies if I handle changes correctly and the support staff knows what to do with what in non-regular production hours.
Just my 2c: there are still pagers!
Another element of paging that is sorely lacking is the ability to use modems to send pages -- anyone who runs a Blackberry server on their intranet _should_ know what I'm talking about.
Basically the shift has been away from the generally excellent telecom infrastructure to a more decentralized TCP/IP infrastructure.. Most providers don't have an SLA on SMS messages getting through.
As well, if you've got a machine on your intranet monitoring internal boxes and your network connection goes down, exactly how are you supposed to get to their SMS gateway?
AT&T provides 'Business Messaging' service for an additional $30-40 a month I think, which gives you the ability to dial a modem into their TAP/IXO gateway -- so if you setup http://www.qpage.org/ and dig up a pre-robot-assassin US Robotics Courier you can then enjoy the benefits of out-of-band notifications that don't rely on flakey TCP/IP telecom but instead the robust telephony infrastructure -- but only if you have a POTS line to hook it up to.
The argument for this is very simple -- How many times has your internet connection gone down in the last _year_ vs. How many times in your _life_ have you picked up a telephone and not gotten a dialtone?
I've been wondering about this too [1]. I wanted to team a pager with my smartphone just for nagios notifications. I get so much information via email and sms these days that I keep my WinMo phone on vibrate. I need some way to differentiate between an sms about a down router and my buddy being at the bar from dodgeball.
Having used a pager in the past for this sort of things, I went out to AT&T to pair up a pager, only to find they didn't do that anymore. Most cellphones can't take the place of a pager for these situations.
I could get a pager from a paging company, but it's more expensive than it used to be to add one to an existing voice account with a cellular provider.
I'm still looking for a tough GSM cellphone that I can treat as a pager, and use a family plan to get cheap service on it.
btm
[1] http://blog.loftninjas.org/?p=247
The volume (or at least the loudness) of a Blackberry ring you can do something about.
Pick something to use as the ringtone and create a .MP3 of at at a very low bitrate (using lame, something like lame -b 16 or 32). It'll sound horrible, but it will be loud.
www.skytel.com
My friends and I use to line up pagers on the table, page them and bet on which one would vibrate off the table first. It sounds boring, but it works when you're drunk.
I'm fed up with my unreliable email. Anyone know where I can get a new telegraph key? They used to be available everywhere.
The Huggy Bear character was burried with them.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=huggy+bear+starsky+and+hutch&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title#
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
http://www.mobilfone.com/_pagers/
We use a company called USA Mobility for our pager needs. We send to both a cell phone and to the pager so that we have some redundancy available. USA Mobility costs about the same as a cell phone, but it is unlimited two-way messaging, so we hammer it pretty hard from Nagios with few problems.
Brian T Glenn
delink.net Internet Services
Pagers don't transmit, so they can be used in high sensitivity areas.
ELE101 - Every receiver is a transmitter...
All your base are belong to us!
My E62 on the other hand screams, "I'm trying to piss you off, come deal with me NOW!!!" If set to loudest volume I can hear the alerts and ringing through my pillow over my head 2 rooms away.
Meh--try a Minitor V Emergency Services Pager.
That shit will wake the dead, in the dead of night...
Plus you can buy the stupid base-station amplifier which will make you go deaf on the highest setting. It's also useful if you want to leave your pager at home, yet still know when there's a call from several states away. Plus the base station can turn on your lights for you...
There's no place like
We have "shared" pagers where I worked - everybody trades off a week on call, and we just pass the group pager around. Makes it easier for people calling for support to only need a single number. And, several pagers are tied to that single number so Dev, Test, etc. all get called at once.
I'm a volunteer firefighter for the NSW rural fire service. We still use pagers for fire calls and general information. The comment about batteries is absolutely true. I usually don't have to replace my pager batteries more than every 3 months. And that is not because I recharge them. Also the coverage is great. I frequently get pages where no phone has reception. And it allows me to adapt to ignoring my phone over night. The pager is loud and annoying, and as was said previously, it keeps going until I acknowledge the page. With a phone, at best the person trying to contact you needs to keep ringing until you answer. As for where to get them... Motorola make the one I use. Wouldn't know where to buy them though.
There is USA Mobility. We still use them, but are dropping them when our next statement is due (we pre-pay yearly to avoid piddly monthly statements).
Here's my beef: they cut off our service with zero warning. They claim to have sent us our yearly invoice in July, again in August, and a late statement in September. We received nothing in the mail. I learned all of this in September when our services were cut off and I called their customer service. The last statement I received was a credit notice in our favor in July. Well, I put through payment to them which took about two weeks to have the check cut and mailed (corporate machine), but still could not get our service turned on because we "now" owe them a lousy $25 reconnect fee because we didn't pay within 90 days. That 90 days put our account in a status where they "no longer trusted our credit". What irks me is that we've been a customer with them since the 90's, and we're one of the "Fortune 500"- meaning we don't slack on payments or crap like that.
No amount of logic would sink in to the customer service drone, or the supervisor I asked to talk to, and calmly explained the whole mess to. He simply stonewalled me. We drop a four-figure check in their lap, and due to an absurd circumstance that wasn't our fault, they won't reactivate our service for a lousy $25?
I've had many other problems with USA Mobility in the last year, changing frequencies with no warning and dropping pager from our account, then having to call them for "reprogramming".
I'm taking our business elsewhere.
Or how about he simply has a crappy phone.
No, I think he doesn't understand his phone's settings.
My Nokia E62 can wake the dead in ringing and I can set it to annoy me for 2 hours after a email or sms has been received.
My BlackBerry 8110 can do the same thing. I've also had a Nokia N-series and they are highly configurable as you said. The downside to the Nokia was having to manually turn the alarm clock back on every day; for some insane reason it deleted the alarm clock setting every time it went off.
he does not need a pager, he needs a non-crappy phone. Blackberry's are made for trendy executives that dont want to be bothered. they like the pathetic vibrate and the pleasing tone that says "please pay attention to me."
I'm not sure you've ever used a BlackBerry based on that statement. BlackBerries are made for anyone who wants a smartphone that does more than Palm, WinMo, Symbian or Apple. In other words, me; I've owned all the above and the BB is the most versatile in my experience. I'm not overly trendy and I'm an office drone, not an exec; my phone is for personal use. I certainly enjoy having a phone that pushes email to me and has a decent browser. It's hands down the most configurable phone I've ever owned.
My E62 on the other hand screams, "I'm trying to piss you off, come deal with me NOW!!!" If set to loudest volume I can hear the alerts and ringing through my pillow over my head 2 rooms away.
I'll second that; Nokias can be damn loud if you want them to.
Plus the tools I get from running symbian, I get cool apps that can record phone calls, only ring on specific numbers after hours, etc... Oh and if you really gotta have it, it works with blackberry push. and if you have it debranded, it's as fast as the e61i after you remove the crappy cingular firmware.
There are some great apps on Symbian, though just like the BB most are commercial. The Palm platform is the only place you'll find a freeware alternative for just about every commercial title, and that's mostly due to the years of PalmOS PDAs before the first Treo was born. All in all, my BB is at once the most complicated and most useful phone I've ever owned. The several months I spent with an iPhone were simplistic but fun, until the 2.0 firmware was released and it became so crash-happy that I couldn't rely on it for basic phone functions anymore.
Regarding the Ask Slashdot question: Don't bother with the hassle of yet another digital device and monthly bill. Read your damn manual and figure out where the Loud profile setting is. Find or create a ringtone that is guaranteed to wake your zombie ass up even after downing a case of Natural Light and two joints. You'll be just fine, trust me.
Advice on pagers: I don't too much about the various pagers available, but I do know the pager systems are seperate from cell phones, run on different bands than cell phone service, etc. Cellular companies could easily make a pager-like device (they've got texting after all) but I guess they don't. There's one or two types that use a satellite system, and a few that are ground-based. Usually these have regional coverage rather than being nationwide though.
I work in an environment where all techies are issued Blackberries and audible ringing is PROHIBITED. Vibration is the only permissible way for the devices to go off.
Meanwhile, I miss most of my calls because of the BB's pathetically trivial degree of vibration.
What can be done? Can the BB be modded to vibrate more? Probably not. That is why I'm considering VOIP solution where my calls simultaneously go to my BB & my personal cell phone. My cell phone has a decent vibration and if I can get this to work, I can still answer the call using my BB as required.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
My wife always said that her phone was for "emergency use only". Well that was far from actuality. And at the price of phone service it was costing too much.
I tried to find a cell company that would sell just a texting plan but no one had such a plan... you MUST purchase phone service if you want texting.
I did some searching and was able to find a very inexpensive two-way service. I purchased 2 used Motorola T900 pagers off ebay (incase one breaks) for about $25. New ones are expensive.
My monthly service charge is $13.95 for 125 pages (in and out total). They have an unlimited plan but I she never gets near 125 pages.
I did a lot of searching for the cheapest price. Local companies are around the $25 range for the same plan... too expensive if you ask me. $14 is still a bit high but I am good with it.
Now my wife can communicate with me without having to pay $45-$65/mo for a phone that is supposed to be emergency use only.
One might think this an old way to do things but if you stop and think about it... it is realy no different than texting. She can text all her friends as well as send and receive emails from her pager.
This plan has worked out well. My company provides me a blackberry with unlimited data. So If I need to communicate with her I don't use any airtime and I don't have to have my own set of phones that cost an arm and a leg.
I have a pager for an art project (remote control via txt message) and I found cheap numeric service from pager-world.com
For 7.95 per month I get unlimited local word messaging. For 30 dollars, I get a TINY pager too.
I have a work skytel pager and was wondering if anyone knew of a good news service for it? I can't get the skytel news service.
Thanks
in response to
wahhh! I wanna pager and can't find one, my pussy hurts
use a goddamn ring tone like the rest of us and don't put it on vibrate. FUCKING "A".
andy zebrowitz